Re: encode/decode support for base64url

> On 19 Sep 2025, at 08:45, Florents Tselai <florents(dot)tselai(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On 19 Sep 2025, at 6:50 AM, Chao Li <li(dot)evan(dot)chao(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

>> It’s not common to use two white-spaces after “.”, usually we need only one.
>
> I agree with this

This might date me (and others) but double-space after period was the norm for
monospaced typesetting back in the clackety-clack typewriter days, and that
carried over into monospace font text in computers. The fmt program still use
double-space after period (which is what formatted my reply here, thus the use
of double-space in my emails). While there is no hard rule in postgres
(AFAIK), a quick regex shows that it's 2.5x more common for sentences in
comments to have two space after punctuation.

>> The comment is understandable, but slightly vague: remainder of what?
>>
>> Maybe rephrase to “handle remaining bytes in buf”.
>
> Agree too.

I don't think the comment was all that vague in the context of reading the
code, but expanding won't hurt so done.

>> ereport(ERROR,
>> (errcode(ERRCODE_INVALID_PARAMETER_VALUE),
>> - errmsg("unexpected \"=\" while decoding base64 sequence")));
>> + errmsg("unexpected \"=\" while decoding %s sequence", url ? "base64url" : "base64")));
>> ```
>>
>> This is a normal usage that injects sub-strings based on condition. However, PG doesn’t like that, see here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/nls-programmer.html#NLS-GUIDELINES
>
> Well, that’s a very interesting catch.
> I’ll let a comitter confirm & advise.

Yes and no, the recommendation against constructing sentences at runtime is to
aid translators since the injected string isn't available to them. In this
(and I hope all other) case the injected string should not be translated as it
is a name of an encoding scheme. What we can do is to add a /* translator: ..
*/ comment which will end up in the translation file and give the translator
context on what %s will be replaced by. Done in the attached.

--
Daniel Gustafsson